Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Religion of Technology

“If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” This is the persistent message of the National Rifle Association in America. Of course what they neglect to say is that if guns are legal, those using them illegally will have the best guns. As so it is with all technology of coercion, including the more subtle but highly effective technology of religion. Leiber’s tongue in cheek allegory speculates on some interesting developments of such technology and its consequences.

Before the 16th century, the principal technology of European religion was miracles, or at least the verbal and primitive written reports of miracles, that is, unexplained and therefore unnatural aberrations in natural forces. But these were crucially augmented at the end of the Middle Ages by the technology of printing, causing an uncontrolled expansion of non-conformist interpretation, heresy and schism. The Protestants had the best technology for a time, only to be surpassed in the 18th century by the wily deists and atheists of the Enlightenment with their knack for popular publishing.

By the early 20th century the most advanced religious technology was radio as exploited by the likes of the American Father Coughlin who, at the time Leiber was writing his book, had a ‘congregation’ of over 30 million tuned into his weekly broadcasts.* Coughlin, however was only the forerunner for an entirely new industry of television and internet media evangelists from the 1950’s Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen to today’s Megachurch pastors like Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland. Most of these have been exposed for practising the sins that they condemn - avarice, lust, deceit, etc. And the exposure and failure when it comes, is typically down to more effective technology - of surveillance, of accounting, and of the inspection of records.

Leiber’s religious technology is partly organisational (as it always is) but primarily one that protects those who are part of the religious hierarchy and enhances their physical strength, thus allowing ‘priests’ to intimidate and control ‘commoners’ in the name of the Great God. But the opposition Satanists, known as the Witchcraft, have an even more powerful technology, one that works on the intellect and emotions. They are able to create illusions and delusions among the priestly hierarchy that effectively neutralise their physical superiority. This technology includes moving picture holograms and various forms of stimulative cerebral ‘rays.’

Both sides know that their powers are technological not theological. Dogma is a matter of providing theological rationalisation for what appears as miraculous to the populace. Neither the hierarchy of the Great God nor the Witchcraft really believe any of the official religious line. Nor, interestingly, do they consider the mass of commoners, who are fully indoctrinated in religious beliefs and behaviour, capable of understanding the real game of power being played by the two groups. Therefore neither side seeks to promote themselves through propaganda or ‘re-education.’

Inevitably, I suppose, the dialectic of the battle between the two technologies - the one physical, the other psychological - resolves itself not in the victory of either the old religion or the new but in the creation of a synthetic innovation - the Religion of Technology. This religion worships not a transcendent entity but an immanent system of power and technique. This is the book’s redeeming feature, a sort of prediction which has come to pass. Technology has indeed become a spiritual force, determining and constituting the relationships among virtually the entire population of the planet, and controlled by a remote and mysterious elite. The medium is the message. There is no need to preach it; it spreads itself among a docile and receptive congregation.

Or perhaps technology has been considered divine from the beginning. After all, tools that enhance human capacity are rather god-like. John Milton would have understood the situation. Poetry, too, is a form of religious technology.


* Arguably Billy Sunday was the last nationally-known, conventional revivalist, evangelical preacher who relied solely on physical gatherings. Both his popularity and his influence declined in direct proportion to the spread of radio during the 1920’s.

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